12 US companies flying the flag in Ireland

[“12 US Companies flying the flag in Ireland” originally appeared in The Irish Times and is written by Sandra O’Connell.]

Ireland has long been a magnet for US direct investment. Here are 12 tech firms celebrating Independence Day in Ireland.

Mathworks

A developer of mathematical computing software for engineers and scientists, MathWorks was founded in 1984 and is headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts. The company’s flagship products, MATLAB and Simulink, are used throughout the automotive, aerospace, communications, electronics, and industrial automation industries as fundamental tools for research and development. The company employs more than 3,500 people around the world while its centre in Galway, launched last year, supports the company’s EMEA markets. Speaking at the time of its arrival, Richard Haxby, managing director, MathWorks Galway, said: “We selected Ireland because it has built a core competency in shared sales and services-centre operations. Additionally, Galway has access to a diverse multi-lingual workforce, and it has a university system that attracts talent from all over Europe.”

Headquartered in San José, California, Wrike is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) work-management platform with millions of users across 120 countries. One of the fastest growing companies on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 List in 2016, Wrike earned a number of best-workplace awards before announcing 30 new jobs and a bigger office in Dublin last October – in addition to the 25 people it already employed here. The office will support its ongoing expansion into Europe, one of Wrike’s fastest-growing markets, showing 30 per cent year-on-year growth. The company expects to grow staff here to 80 over the next three years – well above the 50 jobs projected when it selected Dublin as its European headquarters in 2015.

Sojern has specialised in online travel for more than a decade, delivering more than $7 billion (€6.2 billion) in direct bookings for its travel industry clients. The platform uses proprietary data science methods to examine real-time information from search engines, airlines and hotel properties. In April, the travel industry performance marketing engine announced the opening of its new office in Dublin, focused on servicing the European market with its RevDirect offering, a multi-channel, pay-for-performance, direct bookings solution for independent hoteliers. The newly opened office is led by regional sales director EMEA Angela Canny, who says: “With a history of hosting some of the world’s tech giants such as Google and Facebook and an impressive local talent pool, Dublin is the perfect location to serve the European market.”

A leading next-generation provider of wholesale real-time communications and VoIP services, Telnyx opened an office in Dublin last year as the Chicago-headquartered start-up’s second branch. Telnyx plans to hire up to 20 engineers in the next year to support global deployments. The company is also building a technical network operations centre and a service centre to offer customers more coverage and availability across a wide range of time zones and languages with an innovative à-la-carte pricing structure that allows them pay only for what they use – no bundles, no contracts. Reports at the time said the business was attracted to Ireland by the availability of talented technology and communications personnel here.

US Company Ipswitch, which develops IT monitoring and security software, has chosen to locate its EMEA support and operations centre in Galway, with 60 jobs due within the next four years. The company is also locating its R&D and product development teams in Galway to provide capability specific to the EMEA region. The move was made to enable Ipswitch greatly increase its support for channel partners and customers across Europe in local languages and time zones. The privately owned company, which has its headquarters in Lexington, Massachusetts, employs more than 300 people in offices in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

In February, mobile- and web-testing platform BrowserStack, a privately held company with offices in San Francisco and Mumbai, launched its mobile data centre in Dublin and announced its intention to employ more than 40 people within the next three years, attracted by what co-founder Ritesh Arora called the city’s “deep talent pool”. BrowserStack is a cloud-based service that allows web developers to test website changes across hundreds of possible combinations of mobile devices and platforms quickly, eliminating the need for expensive in-house testing infrastructure. It currently serves more than 35,000 customers, including Twitter, Microsoft, Airbnb and Mastercard.

In February, NGINX established a new EMEA operation in Cork. The company offers an application delivery platform in use on more than 180 million websites worldwide. More than half of the internet’s busiest websites rely on NGINX, including Airbnb, Box, Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, SoundCloud, and Zappos. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Moscow and London. The company currently employs more than 100 people and plans to create the same again in its Cork office, in such areas as sales, marketing, finance, business development, software architecture, engineering, and research and development. NGINX chief executive Gus Robertson said at the launch: “Cork is strongly aligned in culture and attitude with the values carried over from our global headquarters in San Francisco.”

Though headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Red Hat is a US business with a local hero on board. A leading provider of open-source solutions, it announced plans in February to invest €12.7 million in a new project that will create up to 60 jobs in Waterford over four years. Red Hat’s Waterford office was established in 2014 following its acquisition of the cloud-based mobile software company FeedHenry – a spin-out from Waterford Institute of Technology. It currently serves as the company’s global hub for research and development into mobile-application-development technology. In addition to Waterford, Red Hat has two other offices in Ireland, in Cork and Dublin. Established in 1993, Red Hat has more than 85 offices globally and employs more than 10,000 people.

Long-established global technology company Pitney opened a new operations centre in Dublin in May, creating 100 jobs. The centre will house a multi-million euro R&D project focused on developing a next-generation e-commerce and payments platform for global brands. “Dublin’s rich mix of client services talent and language skills, combined with the excellent support that we’ve received from IDA Ireland, make it a great place for us to locate our client-support operation as well as our innovation team,” says Audrey Lynch, director of client operations for Europe at Pitney Bowes.

A leading all-in-one website publishing platform, Squarespace was started in its founder, Anthony Casalena’s, dorm room at the University of Maryland. Today it employs 600 people, with millions of websites created on its platform. Now based in New York city, the intuitive website publishing platform allows anyone to easily create professional blogs, web pages, stores, and galleries. In 2013, it announced its EMEA office in Dublin, because it “offers us a friendly, young, and talented workforce in a vibrant centre city location”, Casalena said at the time.

Last September, leading US-based fintech YapStone announced the opening of its international headquarters at a new, 16,000sq ft office in Drogheda. YapStone is a global provider of online and mobile payment solutions for sharing economy marketplaces such as HomeAway and VRBO, and thousands of apartment and vacation rental companies. YapStone processes more than $15 billion (€13.4 billion) in payment volume annually. The company has about 400 full-time employees. Ireland will have a full-service offering, including engineering, sales, customer service, and risk operations, as well as site security and reliability. The company forecasts 40-50 new hires in the Drogheda office over the coming years.

California-based augmented reality/4D company Daqri, which aims to transform the world of work, opened its European headquarters on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin in 2014. Co-founder Gaia Dempsey said at the time: “Ireland is highly regarded as a country for excellence in innovation and technology making; it is the perfect location for our first international office, in Dublin. We are thrilled with the quality of technical expertise we have found here and have been working closely with the academic community, researchers and research centres to define innovative R&D programmes. Having strong interest from European customers in aerospace, energy, manufacturing and AEC sectors, including some based in Ireland, it made clear business sense to be based in Dublin.”